


ever so gently, please lay me down

by brucespringsteen



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Bathing/Washing, F/M, Naked Cuddling, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Post-Canon, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:22:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28746147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brucespringsteen/pseuds/brucespringsteen
Summary: After Sodden, Yennefer finds Geralt.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 15
Kudos: 49





	ever so gently, please lay me down

**Author's Note:**

> yen and geralt deserve softness too. 
> 
> ps there's hints of pre-ot3. yes i make the rules and yes i follow them.

Unsurprisingly, it’s simple to find Geralt.

He’s in a small cottage outside Buki against the mountains; it was gifted to him by a man postmortem whose life Geralt saved decades ago. Yennefer doesn’t know the details—she just knows what Jaskier told her.

It’s nice.

The cobblestone path that leads to the front door is broken and cracked. If she weren’t so depleted after Sodden and escaping the elves, she would right them. Probably.

She doesn’t bother to knock at the door; Geralt knows she is here, by sound if not by scent, and he greets her in the foyer. He’s dressed down, wearing soft cotton breeches that hang loosely on his frame and a large white shirt. Across the heart, it’s wrinkled, as if someone’s had their head laying on it recently.

She knows Jaskier isn’t with him and hasn’t been since the mountain—he’s the one who found her being held at the elven camp and helped her flee to safety, after all.

“Geralt.” she greets. Her voice is harsh and splintered, laden with disuse.

“Yennefer?” His brows furrow. He rushes toward her and takes her face in his palms. “Yen, I thought you had died.”

She smiles and lets her shoulders fall, unaware of how tight she was holding herself until this very moment. Being in the same space as him is a weight lifted off her chest; she’s strong and powerful, and she can handle anything that life throws at her on her own, this she knows, but when she’s with him she feels as if she doesn’t have to face the world alone.

“I’m not that easy to kill.”

“I can see that.” He laughs, breathily, happily, and wipes a hand over her forehead. His palm comes away darkened with soot and blood. “What happened?”

“There was a fire,” she answers. She’s heard the rumors—word has spread that she burned and _burned_. She was the fire. “And elves. Jaskier saved me.”

Geralt’s eyes widen. In one of Jaskier’s songs, he once described them as the color of honey in the summer; looking at Geralt now, dressed in soft clothing and backlit by a fire that is burning in the hearth behind him, she thinks that it’s the world’s only truth.

“My Jaskier?” One of his hands sneaks up into her hair, knotting in the curls at the nape of her neck. The other trembles as it ghosts across her shoulder, where a bright pink scar is. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know.” She is worried about him, though. He isn’t human—this she’s known since she met him—but that doesn’t mean he’s unable to be harmed. “We parted ways after.”

Geralt’s expression sharpens as if he’s in pain. “Come with me.” He drops his hands and finds hers, interlacing their fingers.

He draws her further into the cottage. It’s small, comfortable and spacious; the main room is full of well-used furniture and off to the right there is a door pushed ajar. She sees an unmade bed through the crack, rumpled and untidied from Geralt’s rest.

In front of the crackling fire, lying on a cot of thick furs and covered with even more blankets, is a young girl. Her hair is white in the firelight; her face is smoothed and her lips are parted. On her pillow is a puddle of drool.

Yennefer stops in front of her and kneels down. “You found your daughter,” she observes. “I’m glad.”

“Her name is Cirilla. I call her Ciri.”

Yennefer glances up at Geralt. His face, illuminated by the fire, is something so dear and precious to her. She has seen it hold many expressions—anger, passion, frustration, terror, desperation. She knows the look of love on her witcher’s face as he looks at his daughter, nestled by the fire in furs that he gifted her with, because it’s the same look he gives to Yennefer.

She turns her attention back to Ciri. She can feel the hum of chaos between them; it’s palpable, almost, in the same sense that fine misty rain is. She grabs it and tangles Ciri’s with hers as best as she can—not leeching, but controlling it by weaving the two strands of chaos, one lavender and the other dandelion-like, into a clear spell for protection.

If something ever happens to Ciri, Yennefer will know. Even after just meeting her for the first time, she feels it in her bones and the deep red meat of her heart—she doesn’t need magic to enforce that, but it’s nice.

“She looks just like her mother,” Yennefer muses.

“You met Pavetta?”

“No.” She stands. Her legs wobble; Geralt wraps his arm around her waist, offering her silent support. “But I’ve heard the stories.”

Geralt nods. He gives his daughter a quick glance, his eyes softening, before he ushers Yennefer into the bedroom off to the right. It’s sparse, a bed in the center and a tub and dresser on either side. It looks lived in, though, with clothes in the drawers and books in the floor and Geralt’s scent buried even under the dust. He’s returned here often enough to leave a piece of himself behind.

She wishes her magic weren’t so depleted. She would enchant this home wonderfully—keep it hidden from the eyes of those unworthy, keep it in pure condition so that Geralt may return to it with no worries.

“Are you injured?”

She shakes her head. “I’ve mostly healed,” she replies. “I am—exhausted, though.”

Geralt makes a noise that she can’t decipher. “Do you want to bathe?”

“Yes.”

“May I help you?”

She blinks up at him. “Please?” Her voice isn’t steady.

Something delicate crosses his face in that moment; djinn wish or not, she knows exactly what it is. She mirrors it. “Anything.”

She turns her back to him and pulls the length of her hair over her shoulder, giving him access and permission. He helps her undress, deftly undoing the binds and easing the fabric over the bruised parts of her body. She steps out of the puddle of cloth at her feet, bare, and turns to face him. She crosses her arms over her chest and meets his eyes.

He nods toward the tub. “Go ahead and get in,” he tells her, casting _igni._ The candles placed around the room ignite into a low-glowing flame; the water in the tub is warm to the touch, almost hot, and she eases in and back until she is comfortable.

The water curls around her, deep and clean. It smells faintly of honeysuckle and mint, similar to the oils Jaskier often uses in Geralt’s presence because they are subtle and natural, easy on the senses. The knowledge that Geralt uses his bard’s oils while he’s bathing makes her heart flutter and a grin tilt up her lips.

She flashes her smile at Geralt. “Feeling indulgent in your old age, I see,” she teases, flicking water toward him in a tiny squirt. “What will Jaskier say when he finds you’ve been using his oils?”

Geralt rolls his eyes and huffs, but he offers her a gentle smile. “Make fun of me all you like,” he begins, coming around the back of the tub with vials of oil and soap in his hands; he kneels and places his supplies on the floor next to his thighs, “but I smell better than you.”

Yennefer laughs. “I don’t doubt that.”

Geralt presses his chuckles into the hair on top of her head. “Yen,” he says, quietly, smearing her name into the chapped skin at her temple. “Let me help you.”

It takes her a moment, fingers clenched into fists beneath the water, but she nods jerkily. He sighs and kisses her, hard, on top of the head, as if he’s thanking her for the privilege of looking after her. She doesn’t need it from him or anyone, but she wants it. Those two things can coexist.

Geralt uses a ladle to dampen her hair; he massages mint-smelling soap into the strands and washes it out thoroughly before coating on another layer of suds that he twists and piles on top of her head. He holds a damp rag over her eyes, protecting them from the runaway suds, and uses the unoccupied hand to clean her body.

He’s gentle and meticulous, attentive where she is tender and scrubbing off the burned soot from the ashes of trees and bodies. He washes her hair clean after he’s finished with her body and then rubs in copious oil.

Once he’s done, the water is lukewarm and dirty. She stands and he helps her out and wraps her in a thick bath sheet, hugging her close to his chest for a moment. His shirt is getting wet, but she’s trembling, and he doesn’t seem to care.

He runs a hand over her wet hair, brushing through the knots. “We’re almost finished,” he says, putting a kiss to her forehead. It burns like ice.

Geralt uses the bath sheet to pat her dry. He rubs honeysuckle-scented oil into her skin, kneading the areas with the most tension until she is slick and clean and moaning and loose, ready to rest for hours on end.

She lets him do this. She thinks, perhaps, that she shouldn’t, but this is Geralt and she loves him, for his faults and flaws and fearlessness. He reminds her that she is powerful and intelligent and brave, and that she can take care of herself, and that he is there for her whenever she may need to borrow a little bit of his strength.

He guides her onto the bed, pulling the blankets down and allowing her to settle in the spot he was in before. He goes to pull the sheet up over her but she stops him, shaking her head. He raises a brow in question.

“Take your clothes off,” she says, ghost-soft, afraid that if she speaks too loud the bubble they’ve formed will break and all of this will leave. “And then get into bed with me and hold me.”

Geralt swallows and nods. He strips swiftly, shucking his breeches and tugging off his shirt. His chest is expansive, full of white and pink scars and dark hair; his thighs and legs are large, muscular, tangling with hers as he crawls onto the bed and gathers her in his arms.

They roll onto their sides, facing one another. He shoves her face into his throat and she knots her fingers in his hair, holding him close. Like this, chest to chest, she can feel his heartbeat against hercheek. She matches her breathing to the rhythm.

Yennefer feels every inch of his bare body flush against hers. Where she is soft, he is hard; where she is small, he is large. It’s a perfect give and take that she has taken for granted for years—to have something like this makes her feel worthy and commanding and free.

Here she lies, Yennefer of Vengerberg, wrapped in the arms of the White Wolf, of whom she has tamed. There are only three people in the world who may say that they hold this magnitude of influence over this man, and she is one of them.

She will protect this truth with her very soul.

He trails his fingers up and down the spine of her back, feather light and reverent. “How do you feel?”

She wants to laugh, but instead settles for a smile that she presses into his chest. “I feel safe,” she answers, and finds it to be unbearably true. “I feel safe in your arms.”

Shaking, startled, Geralt puts his face into her hair and inhales, deeply, scenting her. “You don’t smell like yourself.”

She grins. “I smell like you.”

“We smell like Jaskier,” he corrects her. Yennefer’s heart stutters out of rhythm. Geralt feels it. “What happened, Yen?”

Yennefer grits her teeth and clutches Geralt’s hair in her fingers until her knuckles are as white as bone. “I don’t wish to speak of it right now,” she replies. She brings her hand down from his hair and splays her fingers across his chest. “The story will be there in the morning.”

“Will you?”

She knows what he is asking of her, but she can’t answer right now. Everything still feels raw, even cuddled up in his arms as she is. They can have this with one another, for a moment, but it isn’t going to last.

He doesn’t seem angry with her. He may have been, before, impatient with a short fuse, but something has happened since the last time they saw one another. She understands that. It feels almost as if her world has been picked up and turned upside down, suspended in the air. She’s hanging on as best she can, but her grip is slipping and there is no one to lift her up other than herself.

It is lovely to know that Geralt will catch her if she falls, though.

*

When Yennefer rouses the next morning, the sun has risen high in the sky. She slips free of Geralt’s arms and checks on his daughter, making sure she is still resting, and then borrows a pair of his clothes for inconspicuousness. She kisses him on the forehead as he continues to sleep, peaceful and deep, and then leaves him a note on her side of the bed, promising to return as soon as she can with Jaskier in tow.

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/geraskefers) // [tumblr](https://geraskefers.tumblr.com)


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